British actor Dominic West has opened up about the furore surrounding images taken in 2020 of him with his former co-star Lily James, calling the situation “absurd” and “deeply stressful” for his family.
“The Wire” actor said in an interview with the Sunday Times that the situation was “horrible” for his wife, Catherine FitzGerald, but added that, “we do joke about it sometimes.”
In 2020, images emerged of West and James, who were co-stars in the television miniseries “The Pursuit of Love,” at a restaurant and on an electric scooter together in Rome, Italy.
After the photos were published, West and FitzGerald posed for the press outside their home, holding a piece of paper with the handwritten message: “Our marriage is strong and we’re very much still together. Thank you.”
“Whenever we went out together, the papers would always say we were ‘putting on a show of unity.’ Even if we’d just been rowing about parking the car or whatever, even if that couldn’t be further from the truth,” West told the Sunday Times.
“And so when we go out, we do sort of say, ‘Shall we go and have a show of unity up in London?’”
“It was an absurd situation. It was deeply stressful for my wife and my kids, but there were lighter moments,” West told the British newspaper.
West said that he was able to use his experience of the media frenzy surrounding the pictures in his professional career, channelling it when portraying then-Prince Charles in Netflix’s “The Crown.”
“I’d had a very acute understanding of what it’s like to feel the horror of your name or your photograph coming up in the newspapers,” he said. “There is that dreadful freezing moment when something is being revealed about you.”
“I’d been through it a couple of years previously [to filming ‘The Crown’] and it must have informed how I approached it,” the actor continued. “That gut feeling of horror isn’t something you get inured to.”
In a 2022 interview, James also seemed to address the media frenzy, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “Women in the public eye at some point experience some sort of difficult situation in that relationship between privacy and your life being in the tabloids,” adding that “it was a lot. It’s a story as old as time.”
West is set to star in Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket this summer.
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